How to Use Facebook Efficiently and Effectively: Why Join Facebook? How to Make Facebook Work for Your Life

Joining a social network like Facebook has its perks like being able to connect with people all over the world instantly. However, it can also have drawbacks if you don't use your thinking cap when setting up your account, if you lack self-control, and can get easily distracted.

Why Do You Want to Join Facebook? What Do You Want to Get Out of Facebook?

If you answer this question, thoroughly and completely, before signing up for Facebook, then you will probably find your Facebook experience to be an efficient, effective, joyful, inspiring, and fun one. If you fail to address this question, you might find yourself frustrated and even close your Facebook account out of frustration like Bill Gates. According the internet news, "Gates was compelled to delete his account after he started to receive over 8,000 friend requests a day."

Figure out why you want to join Facebook, exactly. Are you wanting to connect with your 8 brothers and sisters who are spread out across the US or world? Or do you want be able to communicate with your children and grandchildren all over the US or world? Do you seek to connect with other people on a professional level? Do you want to find old school or college friends? Do you want to read inspiration messages and keep track of news in niche markets? Do you want to follow a favorite author or pastor by reading his daily message or notes? Are your looking for dates and personal relationships?

Now, you are ready to join Facebook with the right foot forward. To join Facebook without knowing how you want to use it and how to tailor it to be beneficial to your life is like jumping in alligator infested swamp instead of taking an airboat across it, especially if you are rich or famous or both rich and famous like Bill Gates.

How Do You Join Facebook and Tailor the Options to Suit You?

Open your Facebook account and immediately go into account and privacy setting to tailor your options. Select the appropriate checkboxes to determine whether you want your real name, email, age, birthday, and personal information shown.

Now determine if you want people to be able to post to your wall or not. If you will only "Facebook friend" family and close friends, then allowing access to your wall might work fine. If you are well-known, rich, famous, controversial, or have a lot of fans, then people can misuse your Facebook wall so you might want to disable this option.

Decide if you want an email notification for all messages, posts to your wall, posts on your family and friends walls, etc. Adjust this to suit your needs too. If you have a lot of friends or fans, who also have a lot of friend and fans, then you can get a lot of messages from several hundred to several thousand a day if you are emailed for wall posts.

You can always adjust your settings at anytime to make your Facebook account settings more open or less open as well as adjusting the emails that you receive.

As you add family and friends or business associates and fans, you can adjust whose message show up on your wall. There are many options and combinations to choose from. And when you post messages, you can also select if you want the posts visible to just family, friends, or everyone.

Separating your family and friends into different categories is a great way to set some good boundaries. This will allow you to designate who can and cannot access your individual photo albums and videos too. You can also choose to allow or hide specific applications like those from Farmville as well as choose to allow or hide specific friends and their messages from your wall too. This will prevent your wall from getting crowded by one person or one application too much.

Be very careful about displaying your private life, your personal information, and your family photos especially those with children on a very accessible and open Facebook. For children's safety, sometimes it is best to limit access to who can see your children which can easily be done by selecting the appropriate setting in albums.

If you follow these suggestions when joining and using Facebook, then you will find that you can have a great Facebook experience, one that is efficient and effective, which was the intention of Facebook. Facebook allows savvy Facebook users to use this social network to improve their lives rather than control it or get bogged down.

Sources:
Bill Gates Deletes His Facebook Account, Thaindian News